


Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps

by lanthano (epilanthanomai)



Category: Y: The Last Man
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-09
Updated: 2017-06-09
Packaged: 2018-10-30 04:46:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10869408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epilanthanomai/pseuds/lanthano
Summary: For unanon, for zombieficathon.





	Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by no-detective.
> 
> This is a Hero fic, no pairing. I didn't have the comics in front of me, and I have the unsettling feeling that my timeline's a bit off.

Victoria loves her. Victoria gave her food. Food is power. Victoria is power. Love is power. Victoria loves her.  
  
Four months after the men all died—abandoned us, Victoria says, freed us, they deserved it, Victoria says—one of the Amazons comes back from recon with a crazy story about some bitches who wouldn't die and how they infected Moira and Moira went after her with her teeth. Victoria slaps her for telling lies and slaps her again for calling the women by a word men used to subordinate them. Then Victoria pulls aside the Amazon where the others can't hear and makes her tell the story again. Victoria gives her a handful of the jerky they made from the milk cow who died. Sometimes Victoria loves other women, too.  
  
Hero doesn't like when she has to take a shift at the dairy. Victoria says that when the men died they were freed from being house slaves and farm laborers, but the women they found at the few farms outlying the city didn't appreciate being freed, and they say bad things about Victoria. Hero doesn't like putting her hands on the cows' udders, and she doesn't like their sharp shoulders and the long, graceful slope of their spines, their solid, warm flanks, the live, musty smell of them. They have beautiful, dark eyes and all she can think about is how good they would taste.  
  
After Hero does her shift, Victoria lets her listen while she arbitrates. Victoria is beautiful.  
  
Four days later there's another report of women attacking Amazons with their teeth and their fingernails. Hero thinks that four is an inauspicious number. Hero sleeps with her bow. Hero's power is her bow. Her bow is a tool—it distinguishes her from an animal. Only animals fight with teeth and claws. Hero tries not to think of animals chewing their own legs off to escape traps. Her missing breast does not ache like a missing limb.  
  
The next woman who attacks the camp is put down only after she's bitten Rebecca. Rebecca curses while a medic patches up her left shoulder. It had looked like the woman was trying to _eat_ Rebecca. For a second, when Hero first heard the shouts, the blood had smelled good. Rebecca's blood. Hero's stomach clenches and twists and she breathes hard through the nausea. Food is too scarce to be wasted over her weak will.  
  
Rebecca kicks the corpse over onto its back. Even through the clothing it's obvious. The corpse is missing a breast. The whispering starts but it falls silent as soon as Victoria steps forward out of the crowd. Victoria says, "Remove her clothes." Two women hurry to comply and it is long and it is too short before they're finished. Hero stares. She stares as she has not stared at her own body, at the raw dissymmetry of it. Hero stares at the body and all she sees is absence.  
  
Victoria's snort is contemptuous, and Hero's stomach twists tighter. Victoria says, "This is no Amazon. Can't you see? This woman had cancer. This woman sickened from the toxins of man's world, and she sickened further when she allowed man to poison her with radiation. Our warriors have molded their bodies; she was molded by men's maliciousness. She is a mere pretender to our cause, and so she is nothing. Throw her corpse on the trash heap where it belongs."  
  
Sometimes Hero thinks about _before_ and she hyperventilates and her heart races and she misses her mother so fiercely it's a physical pain, an ache in her belly worse than her monthlies, which Victoria says are a blessing, not a curse, that menarche means that she has the power of life and death in her womb, that she is Life and she is Death. Sometimes Victoria calls Hero her angel of death. Sometimes Hero thinks that that is just another name given to her by someone else, and that she'd rather just be an Amazon, but she pushes those feelings aside. Victoria loves her. A name granted through love is better than a name commemorating a hapless girl dreamed up by a man hundreds of years ago.  
  
In the mess, Hero tries to chew slowly. Food is running out again. They will move soon. Hero chews and chews and tries to find sweetness in the bitter greens. The woman who scours the parks for edible greens—dandelion, she'd shouted, and cried happy tears, these will keep our teeth from falling out—she likes Hero, even though when she put her hand on Hero's breast, Hero had frozen, had tensed all over, until she could make herself relax enough to bring her hand to the other side. She'd brought the woman's hand to the other side, resting over her scar, and there had been tears then, too. But the woman still gives Hero more than her share of greens. That's all the love Hero needs.  
  
At midnight the camp is swarmed. The women standing watch start screaming—that's what wakes Hero—the screams. Hero has learned to sleep through shouted questions and commands. This, though, the fear in their voices, it wakes Hero from a sound sleep. She clutches her bow. She needs to slow down her heart, or she'll be no use to Victoria. Victoria needs her. Victoria needs her, so she is ready. Her breathing is regular and slow; her hands are rock steady. This is what she was made for. She has no weaknesses. She has no need for false serenity—she is not the vain girl she was, searching for peace in downward dog, finding penance in the precarious balance of scorpion. She _is_ a scorpion. She is a warrior. Victoria needs her, so she is ready.  
  
Hero rushes out of her tent and nocks an arrow without faltering. She lets it fly and has another ready before she can breathe out, but when she breathes in she gags and falls to her knees. The smell of violent death—blood and piss and loosened bowels—the bitterness in her mouth adrenaline and bile and dandelion greens—it's a nightmare, a four-month night terror and she cannot wake. There is no one to wake her. She pulls back her bow and looses another arrow. She shoots until her arms are quivering and her chest is one fiery ache and she shoots until she has no more arrows to shoot. She shoots until she is blind, until she is deaf, until she is nothing but the bow and the arrows she sends forth. She is the bow and she is the arrow. She is nothing.  
  
The field outside camp is blanketed in the bodies of crazy women. It is a garden of corpses—pale and dark, hair blond and brown, all blossoming red. There are Amazons and there are the others and they all of them lie with an unnatural stillness. It is an unnatural quietness after all the screaming. Hero feels the burning in her chest, in her weak arms. She wants a bath; she wants her mother; she wants Victoria.  
  
Victoria has blood on her when she gives the victory speech. She is still the most beautiful woman Hero has ever seen.


End file.
